8 ms·

Torvalds: I've pulled this, but if problems, ext4 is going on my shit-list

98 points by torvald 9y ago

lorey 9y ago
Could someone please give some context on this?
- SamReidHughes 9y ago
  It's just some random mailing list post.
- nathancahill 9y ago
  https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/8/6/218 https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/8/6/218
  - Kiro 9y ago
    What's the problem?
    - koenigdavidmj 9y ago
      Some of these are large changes that are recent enough that it's impossible to vet them to Linus' standards.
    - ilkkao 9y ago
      Only clear bug fixes are wanted at this point to make the next release candidate(s) as small as possible. In this case, the PR contained some cleanups. More changes can mean more regressions. The goal is to stabilize the master branch so that v4.13 can be released.
    - xorcist 9y ago
      4.13 is due for release probably this week. Linus cut -rc3 a week ago, which was small, and nothing serious have been heard. Normally only critical fixes would be merged this late which might warrant another rc, but this is Ted T'so, a wizard who has been involved in Linux since before it had networking, so his opinions have merit.
      - tytso 9y ago
        In general we always get to -rc6 to -rc8 before we do a release, with perhaps -rc7 being the most common. Since the merge window (before -rc1) is two weeks, this translates to a two month release cycle. So using a time-based release cycle paradigm, -rc3 isn't _that_ late, although as I acknowledged in another comment in this thread, it was a bit marginal. (And by the way it's "Ts'o", but the wrong spelling is all over the Internet at this point.)
- jonathonf 9y ago
  Ted Ts'o (extremely well-known developer) being warned by Linus Torvalds (extremely well-known developer) about a Git pull request that has a misleading commit message. Edit: correct spelling of Ts'o. :S
  - loeg 9y ago
    Arguably misleading. All of those commit lines except the very last look like bugfixes or cleanup to me. I think it's a reasonable 1-sentence summary.
taeric 9y ago
This seems a prime example of Linus being a pretty awesome maintainer. Blunt, but really just honest on messaging. Or was I supposed to read this differently?
- wolph 9y ago
  If he's not convinced he shouldn't have pulled imho. Reply like this before pulling and see what they reply
  - taeric 9y ago
    That would make sense on a new maintainer. Source of these is a well trusted dev. I don't know, as I am an outsider, but messaging like this is as important for the crowd as it is for the directly involved.
Nokinside 9y ago
This is ridiculous. HN has Linus talks tough and says dirty word fetish.
sexydefinesher 9y ago
St Ignucius bless his heart
moron4hire 9y ago
It always cracks me up how Torvald's "necessary, blunt honesty" is so frequently more verbose than a neutral, not-rude answer would have been.
- em3rgent0rdr 9y ago
  I don't see the s word or any cuss words as being necessary. Short and blunt is just fine.
odammit 9y ago
Every post I see on HM about Linus is about how cool it is that LT is an asshole. What's with the skewed asshole-bias? Same people will bitch about "asshole people" on there own teams that are tough on PRs.
- throw2016 9y ago
  Linus is not an asshole and no one thinks assholes are 'cool'. This comes across as a distorted framing of the issue to fit a preconceived bias. There are millions of lkml posts that don't get posted here, only the ones where Linus has to tick someone off or express a disagreement, usually posted with zero context or history. If your impression of Linus is based solely on posts that make it to HN you have a lot of catching up to do.
  - odammit 9y ago
    Simply stated that every HN post about him seems praise worthy of an assholey comment.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - odammit 9y ago
    Also plenty of people think assholes are cool, otherwise Dan Bilzerian would be a janitor.
    - throw2016 9y ago
      Obviously assholes would find other assholes 'cool'. It's self defining.
- Yetanfou 9y ago
  It is not so much an "asshole bias" as a reaction against the emphasis which is placed on 'soft' skills in management: empathy, tact, drive for 'diversity' even when this means compromising on skills, etc. Linus is known to be an effective project manager who does not fit the mould of the modern 'soft' 'people manager' so any time some quotable reference appears he's cheered upon by those who don't agree with these 'modern' management styles.
mmel 9y ago
This is not noteworthy.
grover_hartmann 9y ago
Why was this flagged? Wow, how lame can you be, HN?
tytso 9y ago
I'll admit the pull request was a little marginal for patches that would be landing in -rc4, which is roughly halfway through the development cycle. That being said, all of the patches got independent review (none of them were authored by me, and I reviewed them all before accepting them). I also ran the tests through a very extensive regression test suite. (https://thunk.org/gce-xfstests https://thunk.org/gce-xfstests). So even though many of the commits landed very recently, in my experience testing catches many more problems than end user testing in linux-next, because not that many people run linux-next. Granted, I certainly wouldn't have sent this pull request any later. After rc4 the only thing I would send are regression fixes, and at most one commit in this pull request could be considered a regression fixes. The last commit listed in the short log "make xattr inode reads faster" optimizes a new feature (large xattr support) that only landed in this merge window. So it's not going to have many users, and I figured it was safe. Cleanups have always been in the grey area. I certainly wouldn't have any hesitation sending these cleanups a week or two earlier. None of them were terribly large by themselves, although as a whole it's a somewhat large merge request for at this point in the cycle: 13 files changed, 290 insertions(+), 196 deletions(-) If I screwed up, and missed a bug in my code review, and it wasn't picked up in the testing, ultimately I'm the one that's going to be held accountable. Which presumably means that Linus isn't going to be trust me in the future when I send in another marginal pull request. In the past, when I was ultra-conservative and wouldn't send any of these fixes until the merge window, Greg K-H would sometimes grump at me because it would delay the fixes getting to stable kernel, and it would also contribute towards making his workload more "lumpy". What I would have done after -rc4 (and perhaps what I should have done for -rc4) is to only push those fixes that were cc'ed to stable@vger.kernel.org or were specifically regression fixes. Bottom line: I did realize that what I was sending to Linus was pushing the boundaries a bit. And Linus was making sure that I knew that.
- w8rbt 9y ago
  Awesome. Sounds as if the system is working like it should. Thanks for all the ext file system work over the years.
- binaryapparatus 9y ago
  Huge respect for both! Shows over and over again how clear communication beats political correctness every time.
achtung666 9y ago
BREAKING NEWS: Linus used word "shit" on email message. Geez, srsly...

98 points by torvald 9y ago

lorey 9y ago

Could someone please give some context on this?

SamReidHughes 9y ago
It's just some random mailing list post.
nathancahill 9y ago
https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/8/6/218 https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/8/6/218
- Kiro 9y ago
  What's the problem?
  - koenigdavidmj 9y ago
    Some of these are large changes that are recent enough that it's impossible to vet them to Linus' standards.
  - ilkkao 9y ago
    Only clear bug fixes are wanted at this point to make the next release candidate(s) as small as possible. In this case, the PR contained some cleanups. More changes can mean more regressions. The goal is to stabilize the master branch so that v4.13 can be released.
  - xorcist 9y ago
    4.13 is due for release probably this week. Linus cut -rc3 a week ago, which was small, and nothing serious have been heard. Normally only critical fixes would be merged this late which might warrant another rc, but this is Ted T'so, a wizard who has been involved in Linux since before it had networking, so his opinions have merit.
    - tytso 9y ago
      In general we always get to -rc6 to -rc8 before we do a release, with perhaps -rc7 being the most common. Since the merge window (before -rc1) is two weeks, this translates to a two month release cycle. So using a time-based release cycle paradigm, -rc3 isn't _that_ late, although as I acknowledged in another comment in this thread, it was a bit marginal. (And by the way it's "Ts'o", but the wrong spelling is all over the Internet at this point.)
jonathonf 9y ago
Ted Ts'o (extremely well-known developer) being warned by Linus Torvalds (extremely well-known developer) about a Git pull request that has a misleading commit message. Edit: correct spelling of Ts'o. :S
- loeg 9y ago
  Arguably misleading. All of those commit lines except the very last look like bugfixes or cleanup to me. I think it's a reasonable 1-sentence summary.

taeric 9y ago

This seems a prime example of Linus being a pretty awesome maintainer. Blunt, but really just honest on messaging. Or was I supposed to read this differently?

wolph 9y ago
If he's not convinced he shouldn't have pulled imho. Reply like this before pulling and see what they reply
- taeric 9y ago
  That would make sense on a new maintainer. Source of these is a well trusted dev. I don't know, as I am an outsider, but messaging like this is as important for the crowd as it is for the directly involved.

Nokinside 9y ago

This is ridiculous. HN has Linus talks tough and says dirty word fetish.

sexydefinesher 9y ago

St Ignucius bless his heart

moron4hire 9y ago

It always cracks me up how Torvald's "necessary, blunt honesty" is so frequently more verbose than a neutral, not-rude answer would have been.

em3rgent0rdr 9y ago
I don't see the s word or any cuss words as being necessary. Short and blunt is just fine.

odammit 9y ago

Every post I see on HM about Linus is about how cool it is that LT is an asshole. What's with the skewed asshole-bias? Same people will bitch about "asshole people" on there own teams that are tough on PRs.

throw2016 9y ago
Linus is not an asshole and no one thinks assholes are 'cool'. This comes across as a distorted framing of the issue to fit a preconceived bias. There are millions of lkml posts that don't get posted here, only the ones where Linus has to tick someone off or express a disagreement, usually posted with zero context or history. If your impression of Linus is based solely on posts that make it to HN you have a lot of catching up to do.
- odammit 9y ago
  Simply stated that every HN post about him seems praise worthy of an assholey comment.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- odammit 9y ago
  Also plenty of people think assholes are cool, otherwise Dan Bilzerian would be a janitor.
  - throw2016 9y ago
    Obviously assholes would find other assholes 'cool'. It's self defining.
Yetanfou 9y ago
It is not so much an "asshole bias" as a reaction against the emphasis which is placed on 'soft' skills in management: empathy, tact, drive for 'diversity' even when this means compromising on skills, etc. Linus is known to be an effective project manager who does not fit the mould of the modern 'soft' 'people manager' so any time some quotable reference appears he's cheered upon by those who don't agree with these 'modern' management styles.

mmel 9y ago

This is not noteworthy.

grover_hartmann 9y ago

Why was this flagged? Wow, how lame can you be, HN?

tytso 9y ago

I'll admit the pull request was a little marginal for patches that would be landing in -rc4, which is roughly halfway through the development cycle. That being said, all of the patches got independent review (none of them were authored by me, and I reviewed them all before accepting them). I also ran the tests through a very extensive regression test suite. (https://thunk.org/gce-xfstests https://thunk.org/gce-xfstests). So even though many of the commits landed very recently, in my experience testing catches many more problems than end user testing in linux-next, because not that many people run linux-next. Granted, I certainly wouldn't have sent this pull request any later. After rc4 the only thing I would send are regression fixes, and at most one commit in this pull request could be considered a regression fixes. The last commit listed in the short log "make xattr inode reads faster" optimizes a new feature (large xattr support) that only landed in this merge window. So it's not going to have many users, and I figured it was safe. Cleanups have always been in the grey area. I certainly wouldn't have any hesitation sending these cleanups a week or two earlier. None of them were terribly large by themselves, although as a whole it's a somewhat large merge request for at this point in the cycle: 13 files changed, 290 insertions(+), 196 deletions(-) If I screwed up, and missed a bug in my code review, and it wasn't picked up in the testing, ultimately I'm the one that's going to be held accountable. Which presumably means that Linus isn't going to be trust me in the future when I send in another marginal pull request. In the past, when I was ultra-conservative and wouldn't send any of these fixes until the merge window, Greg K-H would sometimes grump at me because it would delay the fixes getting to stable kernel, and it would also contribute towards making his workload more "lumpy". What I would have done after -rc4 (and perhaps what I should have done for -rc4) is to only push those fixes that were cc'ed to stable@vger.kernel.org or were specifically regression fixes. Bottom line: I did realize that what I was sending to Linus was pushing the boundaries a bit. And Linus was making sure that I knew that.

w8rbt 9y ago
Awesome. Sounds as if the system is working like it should. Thanks for all the ext file system work over the years.
binaryapparatus 9y ago
Huge respect for both! Shows over and over again how clear communication beats political correctness every time.

achtung666 9y ago

BREAKING NEWS: Linus used word "shit" on email message. Geez, srsly...